31 Days of Halloween: Relic

 2020, Natalie Erika James (a number of shorts) -- download

Kay (Emily Mortimer, Shutter Island) and Sam (Bella Heathcote, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) come to the Australian countryside to deal with Kay's elderly mother having gone missing. The old woman lives alone in a house on the family land. After a few days of stress, stress you can see Kay doesn't want to be dealing with, Edna (Robyn Nevin, Cleverman) reappears with no explanation, and no real awareness of the furor she caused. They all try to recover, while thinking about what to do with Edna next.

I get it, the movie was primarily focused on the extreme difficulties between a woman who did not get along with her mother, for reasons never explained nor really requiring one, as the woman enters the dangerous stages of dementia. That was the core horror. And this aspect of the movie was well handled, uncomfortable yet not judgmental from any's point of view. Alas, the actual horror aspects were not as well done.

Sorry, let me rephrase that. The production values and execution were well done, but the story... well, it turns out there is no story, just weird events that culminate on a confounding resolution, if you could even call it that. While dealing with her mother's return which is mixed with antipathy and upset, they begin to notice that something is not entirely right with her mother, or the house. A black mold is growing, centred around a stained glass insert, something that is supposed to be all that is left from the original homesteading on the land. Kay is having nightmares about that homesteading. And then Sam goes looking for something in the hoarder style closet in Edna's bedroom. That is when things get interesting, only to even more quickly derail.

So, the house is being affected by the relic, the stained glass insert. Corrupted TARDIS perhaps, with halls that twist and turn and go up and down beyond the confines of the house. Sam gets lost, and we suspect that is where Edna disappeared too. At the same time, Kay notices the bruises on her mother have expanded, more like the black mold beginning to seep into everything in the house. Is there something in the house, in the creepy hallways, with them? Maybe. All that is forgotten when Kay comes stumbling into the inescapable hallways to find her daughter, and to escape her mother who is ... morphing? No longer her mother and being replaced by something? Who knows, but it is effectively creepy, it just has no basis in the story, no mythology, not even a hint.

Finally the two women escape from the hallways and her not-mother, only for Kay to turn around and carry the peeling, rotting, cracking creature up to her bedroom. What she peels out from under her mother's skin is not human, maybe not even female, but she treats it with all the gentleness & forgiveness she seemingly never gave her mother. 

Why? Why would someone be gentle with a monster, especially with something that came out of her mother, like an evil black butterfly from the chrysalis? There is nothing to grasp at her, no details for my storyteller mind to fill in. We are left just going, "Huh? Huh..." And that stained glasses insert? Its point, its part in all of this? Nope, no idea. And what happened in the homestead? No idea, no guesses.